The storage of music on digital media has presented a number of opportunities to miniaturize storage devices for music, thus enabling larger amounts of music to be stored in one place, and to radically alter the presentation of this music. In addition to the actual music sound data, new data related to certain characteristics of the music can now be overlaid in the storage media. This enables a listener to organize and playback music in a highly customized manner. It is no longer strictly necessary to store music in one format (e.g., a single disc or record) and playback individual selections from this disc or record according to a strict organization scheme. Likewise, advances in data compression and storage technology have enabled much larger quantities of digital data to be stored on magnetic disc and optical media than previously. The "Red Book" format common to music compact discs is somewhat inefficient due to its slow sample rate, and a much larger amount of data can be compressed on a standard data optical disc (CD-ROM), and decompressed and replayed using any number of readily available playback software routines.
In addition, most computers and data processing devices are now equipped with multimedia programs and advanced high-fidelity sound.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide a music organizer and entertainment center that takes advantage of the latest advances in music data compression, storage and data processing capabilities. It is a further object of this invention to provide a user with the ability to fully customize playback of music according to a variety of parameters including categories of music. The graphical presentation of playback and storage controls should be easy to use and learn, and should take advantage of color and other visual aids.